


Chronicle

by TolkienGirl



Category: Korean Drama, 달의 연인-보보경심 려 | Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (TV)
Genre: Baek Ah is the best brother, Brotherly Love, Gen, No Slash, Spoilers through episode 10-11 and then vaguely beyond, and Wang So deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 12:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9548237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: For all his attempts, he never can quite draw his fourth brother's face.  (Baek Ah at Wang So's bedside and beyond.)





	

Hae Soo screams for all of them, but Baek Ah is the first to reach them. The first to lift his brother in his arms.

 _So, So_. There is blood on his brother’s mouth, the watchful eyes are shut.

He drank death, and he knew what it was when he did.

 

So is everything Baek Ah is not. Where Baek Ah is simple, So is cloaked in mystery. Few smiles touch his half-brother’s lips. Baek Ah has wondered, too, if it is worse for the weight of the mask to be felt every day, or for the weight to become so familiar as to be forgotten.

 _So—So—do not leave us._ Baek Ah is simple, has he not said so? Skilled of heart and hand and voice, perhaps, but no great schemer or warrior. Jung will be general, so they say, and the rest wish to be king.

Baek Ah has only ever wished for an eternity of the moments of laughter, of all of them together.

_So, do not leave me._

Baek Ah is simple. And so it is not difficult for him to say that he loves his brother. Perhaps he loves him best, and he feels no guilt for that preference.

There is no one else to make So their favorite. Baek Ah presses his brother’s hand—too cold and too hot by turns, calloused and scarred as Baek Ah’s is shamefully smooth—and prays to the stars Ji Mong trusts and questions.

 

For all his attempts, he can never quite draw his fourth brother’s face.

Baek Ah has the lines of Eun’s smile, the gleam of Jung’s eye when he is readying for a fight. He has drawn Wook leaning, chin on hand, over one of his many books. He draws the common folk and the nobles, the tall trees and the sleek-winged birds.

But when he tries to draw his fourth brother, it is either too fierce or too gentle, and So is neither of those things—

(He is between them.)

 

Hae Soo is in the dungeons. Wook tells them not to visit her; it is ugly, they will not want to see. Baek Ah thinks that what he means is, if Jung sees, his sword will swing far and wide, and if Eun sees, he will no longer smile.

Baek Ah keeps vigil by Wang So’s bedside. Later, it will not have been so very long. But the hours are hours are years.

_She needs you, brother. We all need you._

He wonders if So has ever heard those words before.

 

Baek Ah, in later years, will make portrait after portrait after portrait, chronicling all that was good and all that was dark in the years of his life, their lives, all lives that began and ended at Songak.

But for all his attempts, he never can quite draw his fourth brother’s face.

His hands always tremble, he puts too much that is fierce in the smile and too much that is gentle in the eyes.

For that is Wang So.

Baek Ah thinks he cannot draw his brother’s face not because he does not know it, but because no one else will recognize it. The people do not know his brother’s face.

But Baek Ah is simple.

He never saw the mask.


End file.
